بخش 6

When we arrived at the Taheris’ home the next evening—for lafz, the ceremony of “giving word”—I had to park the Ford across the street. Their driveway was already jammed with cars.

“Baba. Are you all right? Do you feel up to this?”

“Up to this? It’s the happiest day of my life, Amir,” he said, smiling tiredly.

I could hear chatter from the other side as I rang the bell. A face peeked through the curtains of the foyer window and disappeared. “They’re here!” I heard a woman’s voice say.

Khanum Taheri opened the door. “Salaam alaykum,” she said, beaming. I planted a kiss on her hand, just as Baba had instructed me to do the night before.

She led us through a brightly lit hallway to the living room. The living room was packed with about two dozen guests seated on chairs placed along the walls. When Baba entered, everybody stood up. We went around the room, Baba leading slowly, me behind him, shaking hands and greeting the guests. The general—still in his gray suit—and Baba embraced, gently tapping each other on the back. They said their Salaams in respectful hushed tones.

The general held me at arm’s length and smiled knowingly, as if saying, “Now, this is the right way—the Afghan way—to do it, bachem.” We kissed three times on the cheek.

We sat in the crowded room, Baba and I next to each other, across from the general and his wife. In keeping with tradition, Soraya was not present.

Baba cleared his own throat. When he began, he couldn’t speak in complete sentences without stopping to breathe. “General Sahib, Khanum Jamila jan . . . it’s with great humility that my son and I . . . have come to your home today.” He stopped. Caught his breath. Wiped his brow. “Amir jan is my only son …my only child, and he has been a good son to me. I hope he proves…worthy of your kindness. I ask that you honor Amir jan and me . . . and accept my son into your family.” The general nodded politely.

“We are honored to welcome the son of a man such as yourself into our family,” he said. “I was your humble admirer in Kabul and remain so today. We are honored that your family and ours will be joined.

“Amir jan, as for you, I welcome you to my home as a son, as the husband of my daughter who is the noor of my eye. Your pain will be our pain, your joy our joy. You both have our blessings.” Everyone applauded, and with that signal, heads turned toward the hallway. The moment I’d waited for.

Soraya appeared at the end. Dressed in a stunning wine-colored traditional Afghan dress with long sleeves and gold trimmings. Baba’s hand took mine and tightened. Khanum Taheri burst into fresh tears. Slowly, Soraya came to us, tailed by a procession of young female relatives.

She kissed my father’s hands. Sat beside me at last, her eyes downcast.

The applause swelled.

According to tradition, Soraya’s family would have thrown the engagement party, the Shirini-khori—or “Eating of the Sweets” ceremony. Then an engagement period would have followed which would have lasted a few months. Then the wedding, which would be paid for by Baba.

We all agreed that Soraya and I would forgo the Shirini-khori. Everyone knew the reason, so no one had to actually say it: that Baba didn’t have months to live.

Baba spent $35,000, nearly the balance of his life savings, on the awroussi, the wedding ceremony. He rented a large Afghan banquet hall in Fremont—the man who owned it knew him from Kabul and gave him a substantial discount. Baba paid for the chi-las, our matching wedding bands, and for the diamond ring I picked out. He bought my tuxedo, and my traditional green suit for the nika—the swearing ceremony.

For all the frenzied preparations that went into the wedding night—most of it, blessedly, by Khanum Taheri and her friends— I remember only a handful of moments from it.

I remember our nika. We were seated around a table, Soraya and I dressed in green—the color of Islam, but also the color of spring and new beginnings. I wore a suit, Soraya (the only woman at the table) a veiled long-sleeved dress. Baba, General Taheri (in a tuxedo this time), and several of Soraya’s uncles were also present at the table. The mullah questioned the witnesses and read from the Koran. We said our oaths. Signed the certificates. One of Soraya’s uncles from Virginia, Sharif jan, Khanum Taheri’s brother, stood up and cleared his throat. Soraya had told me that he had lived in the U.S. for more than twenty years. He worked for the INS and had an American wife. He was also a poet. A small man with a birdlike face and fluffy hair, he read a lengthy poem dedicated to Soraya, jotted down on hotel stationery paper. “Wah wah, Sharif jan!” everyone exclaimed when he finished.

I remember walking toward the stage, now in my tuxedo, Soraya a veiled pari in white, our hands locked. Baba hobbled next to me, the general and his wife beside their daughter.

I remember sitting on the sofa, set on the stage like a throne, Soraya’s hand in mine, as three hundred or so faces looked on. I whispered to her for the first time that I loved her. A blush, red like henna, bloomed on her cheeks.

I remember sweat-drenched men dancing the traditional attan in a circle, bouncing. I remember wishing Rahim Khan were there.

And I remember wondering if Hassan too had married. And if so, whose henna-painted hands had he held?

Around 2 a.m., the party moved from the banquet hall to Baba’s apartment. Tea flowed once more and music played until the neighbors called the cops. Later that night, the sun less than an hour from rising and the guests finally gone, Soraya and I lay together for the first time. All my life, I’d been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

It was Soraya who suggested that she move in with Baba and me.

“I thought you might want us to have our own place,” I said.

“With Kaka jan as sick as he is?” she replied. Her eyes told me that was no way to start a marriage. I kissed her. “Thank you.”

Soraya dedicated herself to taking care of my father. She made his toast and tea in the morning, and helped him in and out of bed. She gave him his pain pills, washed his clothes, read him the international section of the newspaper every afternoon. And when he became bedridden, she turned him on his side every hour so he wouldn’t get a bedsore.

One day, I came home from the pharmacy with Baba’s morphine pills. Just as I shut the door, I caught a glimpse of Soraya quickly sliding something under Baba’s blanket. “Hey, I saw that! What were you two doing?” I said.

“Nothing,” Soraya said, smiling.

“Liar.” I lifted Baba’s blanket. “What’s this?” I said, though as soon as I picked up the leather-bound book, I knew. I remembered the fireworks the night Rahim Khan had given it to me.

“I can’t believe you can write like this,” Soraya said.

Baba dragged his head off the pillow. “I put her up to it. I hope you don’t mind.”

I gave the notebook back to Soraya and left the room. Baba hated it when I cried.

A month after the wedding, the Taheris, Sharif, his wife Suzy, and several of Soraya’s aunts came over to our apartment for dinner. Soraya made sabzi challow—white rice with spinach and lamb. After dinner, we all had green tea and played cards where Baba lay under a wool blanket. He watched me joking with Sharif, watched Soraya and me lacing our fingers together, watched me push back a loose curl of her hair. I could see his internal smile, as wide as the skies of Kabul on nights when the poplars shivered and the sound of crickets swelled in the gardens.

Just before midnight, Baba asked us to help him into bed. Soraya and I placed his arms on our shoulders and wrapped ours around his back. When we lowered him, he had Soraya turn off the bedside lamp. He asked us to lean in, gave us each a kiss.

“I’ll come back with your morphine and a glass of water, Kaka jan,” Soraya said.

“Not tonight,” he said. “There is no pain tonight.”

“Okay,” she said. She pulled up his blanket. We closed the door.

Baba never woke up.

They filled the parking spots at the mosque in Hayward. The men’s section of the mosque was a large square room, covered with Afghan rugs and thin mattresses placed in parallel lines. Men filed into the room, leaving their shoes at the entrance, and sat cross-legged on the mattresses. A mullah chanted surrahs from the Koran into a microphone. I sat by the door, the customary position for the family of the deceased.

As words from the Koran reverberated through the room, I thought of the old story of Baba wrestling a black bear in Baluchistan. Baba had wrestled bears his whole life. Losing his young wife. Raising a son by himself. Leaving his beloved homeland, his watan. Poverty. Indignity. In the end, a bear had come that he couldn’t best. But even then, he had lost on his own terms.

After each round of prayers, groups of mourners lined up and greeted me on their way out. I smiled politely, thanked them for their wishes, listened to whatever they had to say about Baba.

“. . . helped me build the house in Taimani . . .”

“. . . no one else to turn to and he lent me . . .”

“. . . found me a job . . . barely knew me . . .”

Listening to them, I realized how much of who I was, what I was, had been defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people’s lives. My whole life, I had been “Baba’s son.” Now he was gone. Baba couldn’t show me the way anymore; I’d have to find it on my own.

The thought of it terrified me.

Because Soraya and I never had an engagement period, much of what I learned about the Taheris I learned after I married into their family. For example, I learned that, once a month, the general suffered from blinding migraines that lasted almost a week. I learned from Soraya that he and Khanum Taheri had slept in separate rooms for as long as she could remember. I learned that he had kept his family on welfare and had never held a job in the U.S., preferring to cash government-issued checks than degrading himself with work unsuitable for a man of his stature—he saw the flea market only as a hobby, a way to socialize with his fellow Afghans. The general believed that, sooner or later, Afghanistan would be freed, the monarchy restored, and his services would once again be called upon. So every day, he donned his gray suit, wound his pocket watch, and waited.

I learned that Khanum Taheri—whom I called Khala Jamila now—had once been famous in Kabul for her enchanting singing voice. But as much as the general appreciated listening to music, he believed the performing of it best left to those with lesser reputations. That she never sing in public had been one of the general’s conditions when they had married. Soraya told me that her mother had wanted to sing at our wedding, only one song, but the general gave her one of his looks and the matter was buried.

Unlike the general’s guarded and diplomatic manners, Khala Jamila made no secret of how much she adored me. Because I had rid her heart of its gravest malady that no honorable khastegar would ask for her daughter’s hand. That her daughter would age alone, husbandless, childless. Every woman needed a husband. Even if he did silence the song in her.

Shortly after Baba’s death, Soraya and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Fremont, just a few blocks away from the general and Khala Jamila’s house. Soraya’s parents bought us a brown leather couch and a set of Mikasa dishes as housewarming presents. The general gave me an additional present, a brand-new IBM typewriter. In the box, he had slipped a note written in Farsi: Amir jan, I hope you discover many tales on these keys. General Iqbal Taheri

I sold Baba’s VW bus and, to this day, I have not gone back to the flea market. I would drive to his gravesite every Friday, and, sometimes, I’d find a fresh bouquet of freesias by the headstone and know Soraya had been there too.

Soraya and I settled into the routines—and minor wonders— of married life. I got my acceptance at San Jose State that summer and declared an English major. I took on a security job, swing shift at a furniture warehouse in Sunnyvale. The job was dreadfully boring, but its saving grace was a considerable one. It was in the Pine-Sol-scented office of that furniture warehouse that I began my first novel.

Soraya joined me at San Jose State the following year and enrolled, to her father’s chagrin, in the teaching track.

“I don’t know why you’re wasting your talents like this,” the general said one night over dinner. “An intelligent girl like you could become a lawyer, a political scientist. And, Inshallah, when Afghanistan is free, you could help write the new constitution. There would be a need for young talented Afghans like you. They might even offer you a ministry position, given your family name.” I could see Soraya holding back, her face tightening.

After the general excused himself to meet some friends in Hayward, Khala Jamila tried to console Soraya. “He means well,” she said. “He just wants you to be successful.”

“Successful,” Soraya hissed. “At least I’m not like him, sitting around while other people fight the Shorawi, waiting for when the dust settles so he can move in and reclaim his posh little government position. Teaching may not pay much, but it’s what I want to do! It’s what I love, and it’s a whole lot better than collecting welfare, by the way.” Khala Jamila bit her tongue. “If he ever hears you saying that, he will never speak to you again.”

“Don’t worry,” Soraya snapped, tossing her napkin on the plate. “I won’t bruise his precious ego.”

In the summer of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-son story set in Kabul, written mostly with the typewriter the general had given me. I sent query letters to a dozen agencies and was stunned one August day when I opened our mailbox and found a request from a New York agency for the completed manuscript. I mailed it the next day. Soraya kissed the carefully wrapped manuscript and Khala Jamila insisted we pass it under the Koran.

Six weeks later, a man named Martin Greenwalt called from New York and offered to represent me. I only told Soraya about it. “But just because I have an agent doesn’t mean I’ll get published. If Martin sells the novel, then we’ll celebrate.” A month later, Martin called and informed me I was going to be a published novelist. When I told Soraya, she screamed.

Later that night, after Soraya fell asleep, I stood on the balcony and breathed in the cool summer air. I thought of Rahim Khan and the little note of support he had written me after he’d read my first story. And I thought of Hassan. Some day, Inshallah, you will be a great writer, he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

The novel was released in the summer of that following year, 1989, and the publisher sent me on a five-city book tour. I became a minor celebrity in the Afghan community. That was the year that the Shorawi completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan. It should have been a time of glory for Afghans. Instead, the war raged on, this time between Afghans, the Mujahedin, against the Soviet puppet government of Najibullah, and Afghan refugees kept flocking to Pakistan. And General Taheri, whose hopes had stirred awake after the Soviets pulled out, went back to winding his pocket watch.

That was also the year that Soraya and I began trying to have a child.

The idea of fatherhood unleashed a swirl of emotions in me. I found it frightening, invigorating, daunting, and exhilarating all at the same time. What sort of father would I make, I wondered. I wanted to be just like Baba and I wanted to be nothing like him.

But a year passed and nothing happened. With each cycle of blood, Soraya grew more frustrated, more impatient, more irritable.

“Sometimes, it takes a while,” I told Soraya one night.

“A year isn’t a while, Amir!” she said, in a terse voice so unlike her. “Something’s wrong, I know it.”

“Then let’s see a doctor.”

Dr. Rosen, a round-bellied man with a plump face and small, even teeth, spoke with a faint Eastern European accent, something remotely Slavic. He laid out the plan for us. I’d get checked first. “Men are easy,” he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. “A man’s plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand . . . well, God put a lot of thought into making you.”

“Lucky us,” Soraya said.

Dr. Rosen laughed. It fell a few notches short of genuine. He gave me a lab slip and a plastic jar, handed Soraya a request for some routine blood tests. We shook hands. I passed with flying colors.

The next few months were a blur of tests on Soraya: Basal body temperatures, blood tests for every conceivable hormone, urine tests, something called a “Cervical Mucus Test,” ultrasounds, more blood tests, and more urine tests. Dr. Rosen found nothing. When the tests were over, he explained that he couldn’t explain why we couldn’t have kids. And, apparently, that wasn’t so unusual. It was called “Unexplained Infertility.” Then came the treatment phase. We tried a drug called Clomiphene, and hMG, a series of shots which Soraya gave to herself. When these failed, Dr. Rosen advised in vitro fertilization.

We used the advance I had received for my novel to pay for it. IVF proved lengthy, meticulous, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful. After months Dr. Rosen sat across from us, tapped his desk with his fingers, and used the word “adoption” for the first time. Soraya cried all the way home.

Soraya broke the news to her parents the weekend after our last visit with Dr. Rosen. It was an early evening in March 1991. Twice already, she had reached across her chair to caress Soraya’s hair and say, “God knows best, bachem. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.” Soraya kept looking down at her hands. She was tired, I knew, tired of it all. “The doctor said we could adopt,” she murmured.

General Taheri’s head snapped up at this. He closed the barbecue lid. “He did?”

“He said it was an option,” Soraya said.

We’d talked at home about adoption. Soraya was ambivalent at best. “I know it’s silly and maybe vain,” she said to me on the way to her parents’ house, “but I’ve always dreamed that I’d hold it in my arms and know my blood had fed it for nine months, that the baby would grow up and have your smile or mine.”

“Am I being selfish?”

“No, Soraya.”

“Because if you really want to do it . . .”

“No,” I said. “If we’re going to do it, we shouldn’t have any doubts at all about it.”

She rested her head on the window and said nothing else the rest of the way.

Now the general sat beside her. “Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, and when you adopt, you don’t know whose blood you’re bringing into your house.

“Now, if you were American, it wouldn’t matter. People here marry for love, family name and ancestry never even come into the equation. They adopt that way too, as long as the baby is healthy, everyone is happy. But we are Afghans, bachem.” He patted her knee. “Just be happy you have your health and a good husband.”

We all had our reasons for not adopting. Soraya had hers, the general his, and I had this: that perhaps something, someone, somewhere, had decided to deny me fatherhood for the things I had done. Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. It wasn’t meant to be, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.

A few months later, we used the advance for my second novel and placed a down payment on a pretty, two-bedroom Victorian house in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights. It had a peaked roof, hardwood floors, and a tiny backyard which ended in a sun deck and a fire pit. Khala Jamila bemoaned us moving almost an hour away, especially since she thought Soraya needed all the love and support she could get—oblivious to the fact that her well intended but overbearing sympathy was precisely what was driving Soraya to move.

Sometimes, Soraya sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.

June 2001

I lowered the phone into the cradle and stared at it for a long time. It wasn’t until Aflatoon startled me with a bark that I realized how quiet the room had become. Soraya had muted the television.

“You look pale, Amir,” she said from the couch, the same one her parents had given us as a housewarming gift for our first apartment. She’d been lying on it with Aflatoon’s head nestled on her chest, her legs buried under the worn pillows. She sat up, and Aflatoon leapt down from the couch. It was the general who had given our cocker spaniel his name, Farsi for “Plato,” because, he said, if you looked hard enough and long enough into the dog’s filmy black eyes, you’d swear he was thinking wise thoughts.

“I have to go to Pakistan.”

She stood up now. “Pakistan?”

“Rahim Khan is very sick.” A fist clenched inside me with those words.

“Kaka’s old business partner?” She’d never met Rahim Khan, but I had told her about him. I nodded.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Amir.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it . . .”

“Yes, it’s safe. I’ll be all right, Soraya.” It was the question she’d wanted to ask all along—fifteen years of marriage had turned us into mind readers. “I’m going to go for a walk.”

“Should I go with you?”

“Nay, I’d rather be alone.”

I drove to Golden Gate Park and walked along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of the park. I thought about a comment Rahim Khan had made just before we hung up. Made it in passing, almost as an afterthought. Except now I knew he knew. My suspicions had been right all those years. He knew about Assef, the kite, the money, the watch with the lightning bolt hands. He had always known.

Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone just before hanging up. Said it in passing, almost as an afterthought.

A way to be good again.

A week later, I sat on a window seat aboard a Pakistani International Airlines flight, watching a pair of uniformed airline workers remove the wheel chocks. The plane taxied out of the terminal and, soon, we were airborne, cutting through the clouds. I rested my head against the window. Waited, in vain, for sleep.

Three hours after my flight landed in Peshawar, I was sitting on shredded upholstery in the backseat of a smoke-filled taxicab. My driver, a chain-smoking, sweaty little man who introduced himself as Gholam, drove nonchalantly and recklessly, averting collisions by the thinnest of margins.

The city was bursting with sounds; the shouts of vendors rang in my ears mingled with the blare of Hindi music, the sputtering of rickshaws, and the jingling bells of horse-drawn carts. I thought about the last time I had seen Rahim Khan, in 1981. He had come to say good-bye the night Baba and I had fled Kabul. I remember Baba and him embracing in the foyer, crying softly. When Baba and I arrived in the U.S., he and Rahim Khan kept in touch. They would speak four or five times a year and, sometimes, Baba would pass me the receiver. The last time I had spoken to Rahim Khan had been shortly after Baba’s death. The news had reached Kabul and he had called. We’d only spoken for a few minutes and lost the connection.

The driver pulled up to a narrow building at a busy corner where two winding streets intersected. I paid the driver, took my lone suitcase, and walked up to the intricately carved door. I checked the address on the piece of stationery paper in my palm. Knocked.

Then, a thing made of skin and bones pretending to be Rahim Khan opened the door.

We sat on a wispy mattress set along the wall, across the window overlooking the noisy street below. Two folding chairs rested against one wall and a small copper samovar sat in the opposite corner. I poured us tea from it.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“It’s not difficult to find people in America. I bought a map of the U.S., and called up information for cities in Northern California,” he said. “It’s wonderfully strange to see you as a grown man.”

I smiled and dropped three sugar cubes in my tea. He liked his black and bitter, I remembered. “Baba didn’t get the chance to tell you but I got married fifteen years ago.” The truth was, by then, the cancer in Baba’s brain had made him forgetful, negligent.

“You are married? To whom?” “Her name is Soraya Taheri.” I thought of her back home, wor rying about me. I was glad she wasn’t alone. “Taheri…whose daughter is she?” I told him. His eyes brightened. “Oh, yes, I remember now.

Isn’t General Taheri married to Sharif jan’s sister? What was her name . . .” “Jamila jan.” “Balay!” he said, smiling. “I knew Sharif jan in Kabul, long time ago, before he moved to America.” “He’s been working for the INS for years, handles a lot of Afghan cases.” “Haiiii,” he sighed. “Do you and Soraya jan have children?” “Nay.” “Oh.” He slurped his tea and didn’t ask more; Rahim Khan had always been one of the most instinctive people I’d ever met.

I told him a lot about Baba, his job, the flea market, and how, at the end, he’d died happy. I told him about my schooling, my books—four published novels to my credit now. He smiled at this, said he had never had any doubt.

The conversation inevitably turned to the Taliban. “Is it as bad as I hear?” I said. “Nay, it’s worse. Much worse,” he said. “They don’t let you be human.” He pointed to a scar above his right eye cutting a crooked path through his bushy eyebrow. “I was at a soccer game in Ghazi Stadium in 1998. Kabul against Mazar-i-Sharif, I think, and by the way the players weren’t allowed to wear shorts. Indecent exposure, I guess.” He gave a tired laugh. “Anyway, Kabul scored a goal and the man next to me cheered loudly. Suddenly this young bearded fellow who was patrolling the aisles, eighteen years old at most by the look of him, he walked up to me and struck me on the forehead with the butt of his Kalashnikov. ‘Do that again and I’ll cut out your tongue, you old donkey!’ he said.” Rahim Khan rubbed the scar with a gnarled finger. “Apologizing to that son of a dog.” I poured him more tea. Rahim Khan talked some more. Much of it I knew already, some not. He told me that, as arranged between Baba and him, he had lived in Baba’s house since 1981—this I knew about.

Rahim Khan told me how, when the Northern Alliance took over Kabul between 1992 and 1996, different factions claimed different parts of Kabul. “You practically needed a visa to go from one neighborhood to the other. So people just stayed put, prayed the next rocket wouldn’t hit their home.”

“Why didn’t you leave?” I said.

“Kabul was my home. It still is.” He snickered. “When the Taliban rolled in and kicked the Alliance out of Kabul, I actually danced on that street,” Rahim Khan said. “And, believe me, I wasn’t alone. People were so tired of the constant fighting, tired of the rockets, the gunfire, the explosions. The Alliance did more damage to Kabul than the Shorawi. They destroyed your father’s orphanage, did you know that?” “Why?” I said. “Why would they destroy an orphanage?” “Collateral damage,” Rahim Khan said. “You don’t want to know, Amir jan, what it was like sifting through the rubble of that orphanage. There were body parts of children …”

“So when the Taliban came …”

“They were heroes,” Rahim Khan said.

A violent coughing fit gripped Rahim Khan and rocked his gaunt body back and forth. When he spat into his handkerchief, it immediately stained red.

“How are you?” I asked. “I mean really, how are you?”

“Dying, actually,” he said in a gurgling voice. Another round of coughing. More blood on the handkerchief. He wiped his mouth, blotted his sweaty brow from one wasted temple to the other with his sleeve, and gave me a quick glance. When he nodded, I knew he had read the next question on my face. “Not long,” he breathed.

“Let me take you home with me. I can find you a good doctor. He let out a chuff of laughter. “I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great. But I am not surrendering to fate here, I am being pragmatic. I have seen several good doctors here and they have given the same answer. I trust them and believe them. There is such a thing as God’s will.” He paused. “Besides, there’s another reason I asked you to come here. I wanted to see you before I go, yes, but something else too.” “Anything.”

“You know all those years I lived in your father’s house after you left?”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t alone for all of them. Hassan lived there with me.”

“Hassan,” I said. When was the last time I had spoken his name? Those thorny old barbs of guilt bore into me once more, as if speaking his name had broken a spell, set them free to torment me anew.

“I thought about writing you and telling you before, but I wasn’t sure you wanted to know. Was I wrong?”

The truth was no. The lie was yes. I settled for something in between. “I don’t know.”

He coughed another patch of blood into the handkerchief. “I brought you here because I am going to ask something of you. But before I do, I want to tell you about Hassan. Do you understand?” “Yes,” I murmured.

Then Rahim Khan sipped some more tea. Rested his head against the wall and spoke.